Pigs and squatters threaten Peru's Nazca lines

August 15, 2012|Reuters

* Archeologists fear fragile sites will be damaged

* Squatters: Government should mark off protected areas

By Mitra Taj

LIMA, Aug 15 (Reuters) - Squatters have started raising pigson the site of Peru's Nazca lines - the giant designs best seenfrom an airplane that were mysteriously etched into the desertmore than 1,500 years ago.

The squatters have destroyed a Nazca-era cemetery and the 50shacks they have built border Nazca figures, said Blanca Alva, adirector at Peru's culture ministry.

She said the squatters, the latest in a succession ofencroachments over the years into the protected Nazca area, invaded the site during the Easter holidays in April and thatPeruvian laws designed to protect the poor and landless havethwarted efforts to remove them.

In Peru, squatters who occupy land for more than a day havethe right to a judicial process before eviction, which Alva saidcan take two to three years.

"The problem is that by then, the site will be destroyed,"she said.

She said she counted 14 pig corals in a recent inspectionthat also revealed broken bits of Nazca ceramics.

The Nazca lines known as geoglyphs, declared a UNESCO worldheritage site in 1994, were produced over a period of a thousandyears on a 200 square mile (500 square km) stretch of coastaldesert.

They include enormous birds, monkeys and other geometricshapes. The culture ministry evicted a separate batch ofsquatters in January from near a sprawling design known as theSolar Clock, only to face down a new group months later.

The lines are striking reminders of Peru's richpre-Columbian history, and are considered one of the world'sgreatest archeological enigmas, as no one knows for sure whythey were drawn, so large, and for so long.

"They're very delicate and they've survived to this pointfor 1500 years," said Ann Peters, an archeologist affiliatedwith the University of Pennsylvania, who hosted an internationalsymposium on Nazca culture in Peru this week.

Peters said encroachments in the area threaten research by60 or so archeologists specialized in Nazca.

Ancient Nazcans formed the figures by scraping away thedesert's dark iron-oxide pebbles to reveal the white soilunderneath, which hardened as unearthed limestone was exposed tomorning dew.

The head of the squatter settlement, Jesus Arias, denies hiscommunity has hurt the area. "It isn't archeological to me.There was no cemetery there, and there are no lines from Nazcaculture either."

Arias said the squatters are the grown children of peoplefrom the nearby town of San Pablo who want their own homes.

"Our population keeps growing," he said. "These are poorpeople who don't have the money to buy land or a house."

Arias said the culture ministry should do a better jobmarking the boundaries of protected areas.

Encroachments are a common way for the poor, andincreasingly organized land traffickers, to acquire property inPeru. Evictions can be violent when security forces try to prythousands of people from their homes.

"It could generate chaos," said Livina Alvis, a prosecutorin the province of Nazca.

The culture ministry's Alva said squatters are the biggestthreat to Peru's more than 13,000 archeological and heritagesites, a rich trove of information for scholars around theworld.

"We get 120-180 reports or alerts about encroachments everyyear," Alva said. "For my colleagues in the rest of LatinAmerica, who get two or maybe five cases per year, that figureis unbelievable."